“Orange is the happiest color,” Frank Sinatra said of his favorite hue, which showed up in his clothes and his houses. Sinatra bought a modest house at the Tamarisk Country Club in Rancho Mirage in the mid-1950s and lived there until May 1995.

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After he married Barbara Marx in 1976, the couple brought in designer Bea Korshak and architect Ted Grenzbach to renovate the interiors. “Ted made the main house look more solid, less flimsy,” says Korshak. In the living room are Sinatra’s own paintings.

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Two Sinatra paintings from 1987 are in the living room.

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The Sinatras renamed all the rooms after his songs. The floor of the painting studio (“Just in Time”) still has traces of paint.

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“The projection room had old gold draperies and a busy carpet,” says Korshak. “We redid it very simply, with a lot of off-white textured fabrics and furniture from J. Robert Scott.” Sinatra’s first painting hangs over the mantel (a print of it is in his bedroom).

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In the projection room (“Send in the Clowns”) are portraits of friends Nat King Cole, Debbie Reynolds, and Ronald Reagan.

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A hall in the “New York, New York” cottage was lined with Sinatra’s art collection; now it holds posters from his films.

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Sinatra, who was a voracious reader, sits in the Kennedy room. The guest room, where the senator stayed for two days in 1960 during a campaign visit to California, was later converted into a library, but a plaque commemorating Kennedy’s visit remained.

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Inside “All Aboard,” Sinatra’s train room, was a replica of his hometown of Hoboken, New Jersey. “Frank had always collected trains,” says Korshak. “He would climb up there and move things around. It’s noisier than a real station when everything is running.”

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Sinatra’s simple bedroom (“I Sing the Songs”), with a double bed, contains many of his possessions: a statue of St. Francis, a train set, embroidered pillows. Korshak changed some colors to peach, “but I couldn’t quite get the orange out of him,” she says.

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A caboose, a gift from some of Sinatra’s employees in 1971, became the compound’s main hangout.

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Inside the caboose (named “Chicago”) was a full-service salon, complete with a barber’s chair, a professional hair dryer, a massage table, a scale, and a sauna, at rear.

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Sinatra sits by the oval pool with actor Yul Brynner, a frequent houseguest and close friend. The compound eventually grew to include 18 bedrooms and 23 baths. “It was almost a hotel at times,” recalls Korshak. “Frank liked having people around him.”

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Sinatra with his dog Ringo, one of seven dogs and four cats in residence that he rescued from the pound. The two-and-a-half-acre property was filled with boulders and had citrus trees, ocotillo and saguaro cacti, and other plants indigenous to the desert.